Ping Parrot
On-call Paging with Alerts that dont stop until Acknowledged
Backstory: I'm a system admin for two hospitals and I build this website and app because none of the ones currently on the market did what I needed this one to do, keep alerting until the page is acknowledged. We've missed pages from being in areas with out wifi or poor cell phone signal, this solves that by sending SMS, Email and app notifications, as soon as you regain any kind of signal you will be alerted.
The core product is on-call alerting: push notifications that repeat until acknowledged and escalate automatically if they're not. Free for 3 devices, then $8/device/month, with SMS as a +$4 add-on.
The interesting pivot: it turned out the exact same mechanic — an alert that won't let you ignore it — is just as useful for making sure your mom took her medication as it is for waking up an on-call engineer. That became a second landing page and a full terminology pass (pagers → devices, teams → family) without touching any of the underlying billing or alert logic, since the mechanics are identical either way.
1 Comment
The interesting part is that the core mechanic works in two very different contexts: making sure an on-call alert gets acknowledged and making sure an important personal reminder isn't ignored. The fact that the pivot required mostly terminology and positioning rather than rebuilding the underlying system is particularly interesting.